Two years sharing ideas that matter to 100 million people

As Scoop.it turns two today, we are excited to share a great milestone: we’re only a few weeks away from reaching 100 million cumulated unique visitors on the platform! That’s right: close to 100 million different people have been to Scoop.it to discover the awesome content of our amazing community of curators. How much content you ask? Well, a few months ago we counted 50 million curated pieces.

When we started working on Scoop.it, the horizon wasn’t that far. Out of a failed project, we needed to be quick to apply the lessons that we had learned. The first beta version of Scoop.it was launched in just a few weeks as a (very) minimum viable product with just one goal: could we get a small community to use the platform to publish quality curated content? But not just any community. We had previously learned the hard way that the very first users of a product are critical: not only because recruiting advocates is instrumental to any product’s initial traction, but also because they shape your future community: consciously or not, they create the implicit rules and behaviors that following users will be inspired to replicate. Even though we sometimes like to present it in a light way, our ambition with Scoop.it has always been serious: we wanted to make the Web smarter by creating a place where quality content – ideas that matter – could be curated and shared by a community of experts, professionals and passionate people. So we went on to pitch Scoop.it to a few early advocates of content curation: thrilled to receive some of their attention, we started to eagerly collect feedback. Since then, we’ve been in an ongoing discussion with our fast-growing community to continuously iterate the product based on their needs and advice.

Over these past two years, Scoop.it has changed a lot. A quick view of our homepage evolution shows the rapid cycle of our iterations and represents the ongoing work we do to make Scoop.it better and better for more and more people:

Many of the changes we made were the direct result of conversations we had with some of our very involved users. For example, I personally remember passionate discussions with Robin Good and Howard Rheingold that led to the way we display original content sources within each scoop. The idea for highlighting insights (and separating them from content summaries) came from Beth Kanter in a thread of comments on Scoop.it. And more recently, the idea to create a directory of interest channels was advocated by Deanna Dahlsad. These are just a few examples, and we can’t unfortunately list everyone who’s contributed by email, on social networks, and through comments from these remarkable conversations. But we want to thank you all for being such an awesome community and helping us make Scoop.it better and better.

Though two years is an achievement in the startup world, this is just the beginning. We have recently raised another round of funding following the promising success of our business model (that you also helped us create) and have strengthened our team to be better at helping you make the most of Scoop.it. Yet, we feel we still have much to do. So please, keep sending us feedback, and let’s keep bringing ideas that matter to even more people!